SEPTEMBER ROUND-UP
Hello, hello, readers!
I am in a sweater. I am sipping hot tea and outside it’s a beautiful fifty degrees. This is not a drill! It’s happening! Spooky season is upon us!
September has been a month of stability and patience in this household. I’m not the only one who finally feels like they can breathe, now that the heat is gone and the daylight’s getting a little thinner. The girls have been doing well at school, we’ve been doing a new weekly family movie night (groundbreaking, I know), and most days look the exact same. Not the most thrilling circumstances, I guess, but I thrive on routine and so do my girls.
This is the time of year when the seasons paint themselves onto the mountains on the horizon (on every horizon, actually, because I live in Salt Lake and there are mountains less than an hour away no matter which direction I’m facing). The mountains are pale green and brown with patches of brilliant reds and oranges during the day, a sweet dusty pink at sunset, and deep purple as soon as the sun disappears. If you’ve never experienced a sunset in a place with hills or mountains, I highly recommend it—our sunrises/sunsets last for hours and glow in so many shades of gold and orange and purple.
There were a couple of exciting moments in September:
First, I started a podcast with my friend Hayley Chewins!
Hayley is a wonderful writer and such an insightful, creative person. The two of us have been friends for many years, and have always wanted to collaborate on something that investigates the process of storytelling.
Story of the Book is a podcast where we take a single book written by an author we admire (full disclosure; we started by interviewing one another about books we wrote, both for practice and also because we greatly admire each other). We ask about the book’s beginning, the drafting, the revising, and how it because a published book you can hold in your hands.
We’ve got seven episodes total for this first season, with season two coming early 2022. Have a listen if you’re into that sort of thing!
Another happy thing? I got my ARCs for The Patron Thief of Bread!
Advance Reading Copies are the first time I see my books typed and bound. I hugged them and then they were promptly swiped from me, by one daughter, my mother, and my husband. By the way, my husband read this whole book in about two days (which is saying something, because it is my longest book yet at almost five hundred pages, whoops) and he cried and beamed and proclaimed it “really, really good.”
Although, he is seeing the author, so he might be biased. 😉
September was also a drafting month. I have many pieces of a new YA draft, some in better shape than others. It’s not done yet. It’s not due yet. It’s not quite right yet, either. There’s something… wrong-ish with it, and I can’t put my finger on it. I may talk about this in a future newsletter, but for now, I’m plugging along, remembering that you cannot revise and fix an unwritten book. The wrong version of something is much better than a stack of blank pages—for me, at least!
REALLY DEEP THOUGHTS
(This is an essay I wrote about the time I turned a historic hospital into a haunted house with my emotionally abusive high school boyfriend. It’s a little more PG-13 than my usual offerings in this part of my newsletter. Trigger warnings for gaslighting, ghost stories, and infidelity.)
What Follows You
“If you guys think you can get it ready by October, I think we could make a buttload.”
The speaker was the contractor who had recently purchased the old historic hospital in my hometown in Utah County, with the intention of restoring it, and “you guys” referred to seventeen-year-old me, my boyfriend, and the girl he was currently chasing.
We stood in the main hall of the hospital and surveyed the building. Many of the bricks had crumbled away from the walls, leaving gaping holes through which we could see the blue summer sky. The floorboards were grimy, littered with fast food containers and used needles and rotting condoms from the break-ins that had happened during its many abandoned years. And though I didn’t believe in ghosts—at least, not in the white, see-through, corporeal, former-human sense—when we listened carefully, we could hear wind blowing, no matter the weather outside. We could hear creaks, and whispers, and trills.
The contractor wanted us to turn it into a haunted house attraction for the upcoming Halloween season. He gave us a budget. He gave us the keys. He turned over a structure of significant historical importance to three high school kids and promised we’d be able to buy ourselves anything we wanted when this was over. “New cars, new clothes, spring break to Mexico,” he said, “trust me—you make this place spooky enough, and they’ll line up for hours to come inside.”
*
I don’t remember how it got started. I think my boyfriend, who I’ll simply call X, was working for the contractor as a general laborer that summer, and when the plans solidified to make the hospital into the Haunted Hospital, and X was asked to round up other teens to help, he thought of me. I was flattered—surely X had chosen me because I was an excellent artist and painter, and I was both an idea person and an execution person, and I was notoriously creative and dramatic—but in hindsight, it’s obvious he called upon me to be a partner in this hospital scheme for exactly two reasons: because he knew I would participate in bad teenage hookups behind the limp insulation (to sometimes painful consequences for me), and because he knew I would do anything else he asked, too.
He wasn’t wrong. I was a girl who was severely allergic to horror. Casper was nearly too much for me at this age—any mention of ghosts or spirits would have me up all night, clenching my bedsheets, whispering the same verse of a children’s hymn under my breath until morning. What business did I have being co-manager of one of the most verifiably haunted locations in my state? Well, I, too, had a good reason to do this: if I worked here, I could be near him. I could keep an eye on him. That was all that mattered to me.
*
The first thing we did was clear the place out. There was a stack of doors in one corner, which had been pried off the old patient rooms. We wiped them clean and set them aside. There were two hospital beds left in a hallway, both of them black and chrome metal, both of them sporting several pairs of straps. There were strips of the flowery wallpaper and dull brown linoleum that had once lined the interior. There were a few crumpled receipts and blank deposit slips from when the building served as a bank, and piles and piles of beams and other raw materials that had once held up the structure but were now scattered across the floor. “It’ll be fine,” the contractor told us whenever we fretted over parts of the building that seemed particularly vulnerable. “I’ve got an inspector coming soon. I’m sure he’ll tell us it’s safe and sound.”
Every night I came home exhausted and dirty, and recounted to my parents what we’d done—we added a handrail to the canyon-steep stairs, so people could safely get up to the second floor. We’d reinstated the flag pole, a site of the local legend that a crazed doctor hung the head nurse on this very pole, her body dangling in the night air, her white nurse’s uniform fluttering—with what motivation, no one knew, but such is the way of legends. I sketched out a plan—each of us would be in charge of one main area, which would be ours entirely to conceive and decorate and terrify our patrons. I, not surprisingly, chose a section upstairs, right next to X’s—my area was where the hospital’s nursery had been, and where at least one patient died in the elevator on his way up to surgery. And it was where I could most conveniently make sure he did not disappear with the other girl, or put his hands on her body, or stand too close to her.
“You’ve been at the hospital almost every day this week,” my mother pointed out. “Are you sure this is what you want to spend your time on?”
“Yes,” I said, even as I picked splinters from my palms and wolfed down the only meal I’d had that day. “Definitely.”
The contractor wouldn’t be paying us until November first. “We’re just going to split the money four ways,” he promised us, “once I get back what I’ve already invested.” We wanted that cash to stretch, what he gave us for materials, and so we came up with the idea to speak to local businesses, flash the project’s historical significance, see if anyone would donate supplies. We got lumber and paint and secondhand tools. We got reams of this thick, black plastic that we unrolled along the walls to block out the light. We got fishing line to string up upside-down crosses (which in our tiny Mormon community was about as scary as it got, references to Satanism or the occult). One local had invented a tool that he was trying to patent, and he brought it over for us to use—it was basically a backwards glue gun, which shot the hot glue out in little wisps, making the most realistic cobwebs we’d ever seen. “This is what they use in Hollywood,” he told us, and as seventeen-year-olds, we were convinced.
We stuck with the theme of Haunted Hospital—into the building you would come, as a ticket-holding patron, and down a dark hallway filled with gravelly doctors’ voices and simulations of patients dying or going mad. You turned a corner to a surgery gone wrong—lots of blood, lots of fake organs, lots of screaming and lightning and all the usual suspects in an attraction like this. Keep walking, and you’d come to our maze—using all those broken doors, we created a claustrophobic maze, which we packed with dead ends and psychos with chainsaws. Your only exit from this clutter was past a weak patient recovering on a hospital bed; when he tries to get up, you are relieved to see he’s strapped down—until he breaks free and chases you up the stairs.
*
X and I had been dating since ninth grade. He was my first kiss, my first make-out, my first broken curfew, my first cutting-class, my first lie to my parents, and my first everything else after kissing—and for the first six months, he was nice.
Then he was not nice.
I’ve spent enough time rewinding those months to figure out what triggered this reversal, but over the years, I’ve learned two things. First, such hunts for the motivation behind an utter change in behavior and personality is futile because part of an abuser’s tactic is this careful grooming and seduction, establishing trust, creating a history. The manipulation doesn’t start the first time you realize you’re being manipulated; the manipulation begins from day one.
Second, this kind of searching, desperate questioning—what on earth could have happened? What made him change?—is exactly what this particular abuser wanted me to do, because it was a slippery line between “What happened to make him change?” and “What did I do to ruin things?” A line that was deliberately lubricated by guilt and by good old-fashioned gaslighting.
This is the flavor of asshole he was—vindictive and whiny and actually so terrible at rewriting reality that few others were ever charmed by him. They’d look at me, throwing myself underneath him, doing whatever it took to remake the world the way he wanted it to be, and they’d think… I’m not sure what they thought of me. Idiotic. Naïve. Self-loathing. Most nights in high school I would lie awake, hoping tomorrow would be the day someone rescued me, because I knew I wouldn’t do it myself.
But I fell for it. All the stupid things he did… I will tell you this one, because it illustrates the kind of knot I was tangled in. I auditioned for the school talent show, playing the guitar and singing a song I’d written. I got in. When X found out, he asked me to teach it to him. Then he demanded that he join me onstage. Actually, that isn’t completely accurate—X rarely demanded. What he did instead was ask for things that were so outrageous, no one would ever think a person would be so entitled as to inquire after it—but he would ask softly, and subtly, in a way that always made me feel like it had been my idea, and he would always ask the right person. He knew to always ask me.
When I was in front of the student body, singing my part of the song—which he had slashed in half so it was a duet, so he could sing the best parts with his yowling, flat, Dashboard-Confessional-wannabe voice—I peered across the stage, at him holding the blue guitar my parents had scrimped and saved for, playing my song on my guitar and singing my lyrics while I stood to the side like a tambourine-less tambourine girl, and I thought, well, this is hell. I couldn’t possibly sink lower than this.
He started the song, then stopped, and grinned slyly at the audience. “I wrote this song for the ladies,” he claimed, and my blood boiled when a bunch of hormone-soaked harpies cheered from the crowd. I had two choices—I could either deny this, fight with him right there, under spotlights, or go along with it and let him take my credit. I considered it a gift to him, staying silent as he launched into the chords, butchering them in ways that made me wince.
I was wrong. In such situations, you can always sink lower. You can keep going lower and lower, down to the basement and beyond. Only you can decide when you’re at rock bottom.
*
The hospital was built in 1891, originally as a bank, but it had also been an LDS church house, an autobody shop, a sugar mill, a telegraph company, a funeral parlor, a notary public, an attorney, a photo studio, a school, and a ballroom. It had been officially vacated since 1989, though plenty of police records showed arrests of vagrants sheltering in the building during snowstorms. One report summarized what a homeless man had told an officer—that he hadn’t meant to stay so long, because he knew it was private property, but the little girl who appeared to him every night and sang him to sleep told him it was safe.
It had always been haunted to our town. And, as I learned in my research, for good reason. There was a crematorium in the basement, a brick and rusty steel oven that was apparently on the smaller side—bodies had to be quartered to fit into the tiny space. Some four thousand people died in this building while it functioned as a hospital, from 1926 to 1968, when the final baby was born here, and the hospital officially closed its doors.
Many attempts had been made to renovate it, or sell it, or do something with it—for many folks, it was an eyesore, but others found themselves morally averse to seeing anything happen to it except the slow, destructive march of time.
*
Things progressed. We had all our wall-hangings up and our floors painted black and our major constructions finished. We had made enough fake blood to fill Utah Lake, we had scoured every thrift store in the county and bought up all their Bibles, which we rigged with a hidden fan to flip open, the pages fluttering. Supremely creepy, in a town that was 90% Mormon.
On the first Sunday in September, the contractor had professional ghost-hunters come walk through “for publicity,” he said.
The ghost-hunters had the aura of Alanis Morrissett fans—Kool-Aid dyed purple hair, cheap-looking piercings, and fishnet shirts. “We’ve been wanting to get in this place for a long time,” one of them said.
After only a brief inspection, they determined that there were definitely ghosts. Many of them. And they were angry. “We’d like to bring each of you upstairs individually with the tape recorder,” they told us. “We’ll find out if any of you are the source of their distress.”
Any of us? Any of the people currently blasting Cake and Incubus and the Original Broadcast Recording of Rent while we spray-painted their sacred death locations and gave rushed hand-jobs in the door maze?
The others dicked around with a Ouija board in the main room of the hospital while the ghost-hunters brought us upstairs—I feigned boredom, but truthfully I was terrified. Not of the ghosts, but of what the “ghosts” might say to the ghost-hunters through this strange game of Telephone.
When it was my turn, I followed the ghost-hunters up to my decorated section of the hospital. They positioned me in an area we called the “Bloody Mary room” and said, somewhat melodramatically, “Is she welcome?” They presented me to the room, hanging the recorder around my neck, pushed me forward, and then backed out reverently, leaving me alone.
And then I waited.
Waited for the spirits to assess me—a kind of cruel pageant judging from the afterlife.
I did not believe in ghosts. I also did not want ghosts to be real, if it turned out I was wrong (because I was wrong about so many things).
A strip of that black plastic that we’d hung everywhere peeled back. Not a sign of anything; those strips fell off the bricks all the time. The sunlight poured in through one of the crumbling holes in the wall and as I watched, gathered in a corner, thickening. I can’t think of how else to describe it—the light was liquid, and it was either catching the reflection of every dust particle in the room, or it was materializing around—
I didn’t listen to the ghost tapes. I pretended like I was just severely disinterested. It turned out that while both X and the other girl were deemed A-OK by the ghosts, those spectral douches had rejected me. I felt somewhat triumphant and also like I had been set up by the ghost-hunters and the ghosts, and was prepared to write it all off as an encounter with a group made of both living and dead mean girls, when X teased, “We’re going to come in one day and find her murdered in the Bloody Mary room,” and laughed, and the other girl laughed too, and then they were doing that thing where they laughed and leaned into each other and it looked like sex, and I felt murdered already.
*
“Let’s wrap up early,” the contractor said after the ghost-hunters left. “I’m taking you to dinner.”
He drove us to IHOP, where he passed us each an envelope containing five twenties. “This is for all your hard work so far,” he said. “Consider it a small taste of what’s to come.”
When X dropped me off at my house after dinner, he told me he’d decided to save for a Vespa. “Any money you can donate to my scooter fund will be much appreciated.” I handed over my envelope and got an extended and unremarkable hookup in my driveway in return.
That was the first night I had trouble sleeping. I lay on one side of my bed, and then the other. My mind wouldn’t stop racing, wouldn’t stop echoing that shared laugh, over and over—and when it was after midnight, I saw the darkness materialize in my corner, near my mirror, the same way the light had gathered in a ball in the Bloody Mary room, and I thought, for the first time: something came home with me.
Forget the hospital—something followed me home from the hospital, and now it’s in my room.
I turned on the lights and dozed sitting up, my scriptures open in my lap. Scriptures I didn’t even believe in. Anything to make me feel safe.
*
What makes something historical? What gives something the right to exist? When does something go from being current to belonging to the past—five years of existence? Ten? Or longer? And when is it wrong to get rid of something old? When it’s no longer functional, does that make it okay? Or should old things be allowed to keep existing until they crumble in on themselves? Is that how we make history?
For a long time I had known my relationship was dangerous and wrong and rotten, but I was too scared to get rid of it. It had lasted for so long already—three years, which when you are seventeen, is a significant fraction of your life. I kept waiting for a moment—not a sign, necessarily, but some sort of cosmic opening through which I could slide out of my dysfunctional coupling and not be blamed for it. I was in a maze of doors, and I needed one of them to actually function as an escape.
*
We hired our staff and our cast. My section was filled with teenage girls in bloodied hospital gowns and big, sexy ratted psychopath hair—a room full of predators, I thought when X first hired them, and braced myself for the onslaught of flirting that would happen between them and him, but instead he was spending absorbent amounts of time with one of the ushers, an eighth grader with baby chub under her chin. He had recently turned eighteen. “Of course I’m not going to do anything with her,” he told me once when I hinted at the inappropriateness of their hours-long chats in the dark. “She’s just nice. You know? She’s really nice. She listens to me.” The implication there being, of course, that I did not. But I listened to him so much, I didn’t even hear myself anymore.
Another time I overheard him gossiping about one of the makeup artists. “She plays trombone for a ska band,” he said, incredulous. “You know what that means. So hot.” To this day, I still don’t know what he meant by that. I’ve googled it multiple times—is there a correlation between brass instrumentalists and oral sex skills? Is this something everyone knows but me?
The thing in my room hadn’t left. I puttered around reading, folding laundry, listening to albums until it was time to attempt sleep—and then I would lie there, paralyzed, the Something breathing ice on my neck. If I did fall asleep, it would have to be with my lights on and my radio blaring—one night I woke up at three AM and my lightbulb had burned out, and I panicked and ran into my parents’ room, Something following behind me in the empty house, and I slept at the foot of the bed like I was a child. If I was touching at least one of them, the Something couldn’t get me. Those were the rules that I somehow had surmised.
And then it was opening night.
*
I’ve skipped over much of the collateral damage that was done by my time at the Haunted Hospital—my sleep suffered, yes, and my relationships with my parents were strained. My grades slipped and fell off a cliff, my other friendships and hobbies and responsibilities had been, to borrow a modern pun, ghosted. All that existed was the Haunted Hospital, and that only existed as an extension of X—a way to impress him, a way to work alongside him, a way to spy on him.
I was so relieved when October came.
The place was abuzz, like backstage before the spring musical played its first show, and it was a similar crowd—the overlap between the theater department at the high school and our cast was a circle. Outside, people lined up an hour before we opened and newspapers were there to take pictures. Three months of work—sometimes thirty hours a week, on top of school and other extracurriculars, and now we would see if it would pay off.
There were two rock stars in our midst. The contractor, who greeted people at the door and took money and handed out tickets and answered questions about the building—he still planned to restore it, he told our customers, after we were done with this event. This was just a fun way to let local people who had always been curious come see the hospital in its Halloween glory.
And upstairs, X, who had given himself the task of checking on every one of those girls in the hospital gowns between groups of patrons—once I walked in and saw one sitting on his lap—
Mid-October, and I was like a person possessed. My grades were abysmal. I cut class so I could sleep in the library or cry. I definitely didn’t sleep at home, unless I swallowed my humiliation and slept in my parents’ or sister’s room, where the Something couldn’t find me. I got in an argument with X at the hospital one night, and kept my mom, who had come to pick me up after work, waiting outside in her minivan until one in the morning. During hospital hours, I approved makeup and costume before we opened, and then sat in the control room, sulking, feeling sorry for myself.
It has to end, I remember thinking. It has to stop, it has to come to an end.
*
It did end, after the longest autumn of my life. October 31st brought an excitement equal to and surpassing our excitement on opening night—we were exhausted. We were teenagers, after all, working the hospital after school and on weekends, and some of our cast had physically difficult jobs. One girl’s throat was raw from screaming, night after night. Another boy had bruises from the harness he wore to hang from the wall; he fell down off his cross, nearly landing on the audience, half-naked, and now he would feel that harness for weeks after we closed.
I, too, was tired—I had summoned the courage to speak with my parents about the Something in my room. “I don’t believe in ghosts,” I kept reassuring them, “but there’s something in there. Something… not human.” Neither of them believed in ghosts, either; but they couldn’t deny the cluster of bad feelings they’d sensed ever since I got involved with the old hospital. They’d asked my bishop to come and perform the Mormon equivalent of an exorcism—blessing me, blessing the room. He’d be there the following week.
You can’t be surprised at what happened—I walked through my section of the hospital to see if anyone needed hot chocolate or water, and spotted him tonguing and fondling one of the hospital-gown girls. He’d passed me a note in class that said he loved me (it said he loved my breasts; my breasts were a part of me, weren’t they?) only hours ago—the paper was still folded in my pocket, dog-eared from the many times I’d stroked this physical proof of our commitment.
I used a phone to call my mother, asked her to come get me, then told the staff I was sick.
There was only one way out for staff and cast members, once the hospital had opened—you had to follow the path, complete the attraction, down through the door maze and into the basement.
I had refused to go into the basement, at any cost—too creepy for me. We’d made it into a Blair Witch-esque nightmare-scape, and our buddy John tucked himself into the original crematorium dressed as Satan, leaping out to give our patrons one last good scream.
“It’s me,” I called ahead, so the cast wouldn’t scare me, but I was a cluster of rage and fear and heartbreak. I tripped and landed face first in that gross basement dirt and didn’t move; I just lay there and sobbed.
John came out from his crematorium, a gentle Satan, and touched my back. “Are you okay?”
I told him what I’d seen upstairs, and I will never forget the pause, the slight hesitation before he said, softly, “You know he’s done it with every one of those girls. You know that, right?”
“I need to stop. With him.” I had heard some iteration of that about a million times, but this was the first time I said it out loud. And in that moment, I meant it.
It killed me to leave, knowing I was leaving X behind in that haunted house full of girls he’d handpicked himself, but I did it. I came home. I helped my parents with trick-or-treaters, and I went to bed before midnight, so exhausted, I slept through whatever hauntings the Something had for me that night.
And because I came home early on Halloween, I missed the contractor leaving early, too, taking all the money we’d earned all month, all the receipts, and all the keys with him.
*
If you ask the contractor, I’m sure he’ll still insist we all agreed to volunteer, and that we knew every penny of the money would go to him and his grand restoration project. I certainly have no memory of that, and was even asked by the contractor during our first meeting to keep track of my hours, which I did, in a composition notebook, along with my research on the hospital’s history.
“I did pay you,” is what he said when we called him and demanded our buttloads of money. “I gave you all a hundred dollars, remember?”
“I barely broke even,” he told our parents when they got involved. “I’m glad the kids had their fun, but wow, that left such a mess for me to clean up.” Did he really mean to screw over a bunch of teenagers? Or had we each been mistaken from day one?
Or was X the lynch pin, the one who had brought us all together in this project? Had he miscommunicated to both sides, his horrible gaslighting failing spectacularly? That was the speculation for many years in our group of friends, and though it was probably the truest theory, it made me wonder—how come everyone could see through his lies but me?
The bishop came and blessed my room, but the Something had already left—or rather, I had finally seen it for what it was. Something that did not follow me home from the hospital, but something that I had brought there in the first place. Something that haunted me every time X punished me for talking to another boy by giving me the silent treatment. Every time he asked me out for a date, then took me to a church parking lot for time alone in the back seat of his parents’ minivan. Every time he took over the things that were mine—my music, my friendships, my life.
Plus, I was no longer worried about things that were dead. I was more worried about things that wouldn’t die.
*
I still don’t believe in ghosts.
I dated that boy for another four years—horrifying, I know, and his behavior worsened as he dropped out of high school, moved out of his parents’ house, and started a successful business selling various substances to junkies and peddling alcohol to underage kids.
The thing that finally broke us was my pregnancy—he did not want to be a father, despite the fact that he had just made a baby. The addition of a third person into our relationship finally knocked sense into me. There was a daughter at stake. A daughter about to have her life ruined by his manipulation and abuse, too, unless I got away. And so I did.
The year my daughter was born, they demolished that hospital. I hadn’t read in the newspaper that they were taking it out; I simply drove past it one day and the lot was leveled, the bricks in tidy piles, the backyards behind it visible from the highway.
I hardly ever think about it anymore, but the strangest things remind me of it—certain patterns of linoleum, entire albums by Incubus, the way IHOP coffee tastes on Sunday evenings. And then my mind walks through the fucked-up time I made a haunted house and barely escaped, and how things could have been different if I had just stopped following X and walked on my own.
COMING UP FOR ME
Coming Up For Me
HALLOWEEN! Halloween is coming up!
Here’s a list of some of the things we’ll be doing this month:
Apple-picking
Visiting a historic and haunted farm that is actually not really very fun, and mostly just on the list because I’ve been visiting this farm since I was a toddler, and non-harmful traditions are important
Making donuts (we do this when we get back from our family flu shots)
Carving pumpkins, eating pumpkins, decorating with pumpkins, drinking pumpkin-y drinks, wearing pumpkins, dreaming of pumpkins and other less-beloved gourds
Reading Halloween-y books and stories (favorites include The Witches by Roald Dahl, Arthur’s Halloween by Marc Brown, Hallo-Wiener by Dav Pilkey, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz, Small Spaces by Katherine Arden, The Okay Witch by Emma Steinkellner, Mooncakes by Suzanne Walker and Wendy Xu)
And, of course, watching Halloween-y movies (on our list: Over the Garden Wall, The Worst Witch, Paranorman, Young Frankenstein, Edward Scissorhands, Hocus Pocus)
Apologies if you’re not an autumnal fiend like we are, but it feels so good as a parent (and as a grown-up, frankly) to have these things to look forward to every season. So much of being a mother is staring at your kids, wondering what you’re going to do to fill the time—and also to fill the emotional space, in a way—and seasonally appropriate (and, yes, over-commercialized) activities and events help pad out the days.
On the writing front, coming up for me? I’ll be working on revisions for Circus Book (due in my inbox again any day, because the editing process for a book under contract is basically inbox ping-pong), and also turning this zero draft into a real live functional first draft. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s already perfect, because it’s something that came from my brain, and that on its own means it’s a masterpiece. (Not trying to be pretentious, but do you other writers ever stop to think about this? We write books? We make things where before, there was nothing? That’s amazing enough to be worthy on its own.)
TIDBITS
WORKING ON
Like I mentioned earlier, I’m working on this new YA, due to my editor… well, as soon as it’s finished. And it looks like I will spend at least some of October unwinding what I have already, trying to figure out exactly what’s happening with the heartbeat of this book.
But I’ve also been working on non-writing things.
First, and in a kind of silly vein, I’ve been learning how to use a rowing machine. This is not a lifelong dream! Nor anything that I am particularly excited about! But my husband got a rowing machine, and I am always (reluctantly) looking for things I can use as cross-training as a runner.
Rowing has been something I am actually… really good at? Which is hilarious, because I have the tiniest non-existant shoulders, and zero upper body strength. But I’ve found this exercise… relaxing? Enjoyable? Looking forward to someday trying rowing in an actual boat.
The other thing I’ve been working on?
A piano piece.
My piano practice has become… spotty at best over the years. It used to be something I did for hours every day. Same with guitar and singing and tinkering with lots of other instruments—then I became a mom, and a wife, and a writer, and music slipped down on my list of priorities.
No more! I have played the piano every day for nearly two months, which is amazing enough on its own—but I decided to learn a new piece, and it’s nearly polished!
I chose Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-Sharp Minor, which has always been on my list of pieces to learn. Said list started when I was in junior high, and consists of other teenage angsty pieces (more Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Liszt, etc.) but I don’t care!
This has been such a revitalizing practice. Yes, I have tiny hands and yes, Rachmaninoff’s chords are bananas for me to reach, but I feel strong. Capable. Disciplined. In touch with parts of me that have not surfaced in years.
It’s almost time to pick the next piece to learn! I’m eying Hungarian Rhapsody #5, which is my Big Kahuna.
READING
Another incredible reading month! Some of my favorites:
I read Jane Eyre for the first time, and I loved it.
I reread The Crucible for probably the twentieth time, and still loved it.
I reread Gideon the Ninth so I could read Harrow the Ninth. So good. So wild.
I read The Starlit Wood, a short story anthology of fairy tale retellings. A wonderful collection.
I read Wait Til Helen Comes for the first time since elementary school, and found it much whinier than I remembered… but still delightfully creepy.
I started the Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place years ago, but didn’t go past Book Three. So I started the series over and read the final three books this time, and it was so cozy and clever. This is such a great example of a formal narrator and exuberant voice.
LISTENING TO
I couldn’t help it. Fall arrived, and I fell right into Bon Iver. It’s his season. My favorite two of his albums are For Emma, Forever Ago and 22:12.
We’ve been playing plenty of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, and the girls have been on an Enya kick.
I really loved the conversation about Dead Poets Society on You Are Good. This has been my favorite movie since I was in junior high (which… makes sense, since I think it’s a very young teenager kind of film).
If you’re not listening to Maintenance Phase, you should! Every episode pulls apart some “rule” I made up for myself regarding my body, my health, my looks, and my gender.
WATCHING
We watched the final season of a much beloved show in our household, Brooklyn 99. I was so impressed how they wrapped things up while still incorporating some of the mainstream cultural shifts in 2020 regarding police officers.
We started Santa Clarita Diet, which is hilarious and heartwarming and so, so gory. I wrote on Twitter briefly about how the whole show feels like a metaphor about how my own husband cares for me and my neurodiverse ADHD/anxious brain. Brilliant.
Movies we watched this month: The Lighthouse (ridiculously enjoyable), Birdman (SO GOOD), Van Helsing (stupidly fun), The Wolfman (eh, not enough Victorian horny angst), and Mission Impossible (my first time! Wow! Young Tom Cruise is a delight! What happened?!).
I hope you have the most marvelous October, folks! Eat something pumpkin-flavored for me!